


The Nine Lives of Daniel Jackson

by phantisma



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-08-14
Updated: 2006-08-14
Packaged: 2017-11-13 04:21:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/499425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phantisma/pseuds/phantisma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daniel reflects on his life...um, er...lives...and what has changed over the course of time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Nine Lives of Daniel Jackson

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: Spoilers for Stargate, the movie, and episodes "The Nox", "The Light", "Meridian", "Fallen" and "Reckoning 1 & 2"

The first time, it had been an accident, a bit of carelessness, a twelve-year-old budding archeologist on a school field trip and a rain-swollen river. He scarcely remembers it as more than a passing incident on the path to more important deaths. There wasn’t much remarkable about it. A teacher plucked him from the heavy current and breathed life back into him. He’d been too young to realize that life isn’t always so accommodating, or that death wasn’t always so casually dismissed.

The second time he remembers more clearly. No matter what else happens in your life, you don’t forget your first trip to an alien planet, or your first encounter with alien life. No matter how many times you die you don’t forget that. He was dead. He knows that. He remembers the way everything went dark. He remembers the pain. It was the kind of death that should have been permanent, but the rules of life and death were different there and technology could re-write them at will. Everything was so new then, and he still believed.

The third time was on an alien planet too. It all happened so fast, he wasn’t exactly sure what had happened. He remembers Apophis, and gunfire. He remembers seeing the others die. He remembers waking up with a hole in his shirt showing where the staff blast had hit him and he remembers the Nox. He was dead. He knows that. There’s a special kind of pain that accompanies a staff blast to the chest, and he is entirely too familiar with that pain.

The fourth time, he managed to die at home on Earth. He’d tried to kill himself, but in the end he didn’t have to. His body had shut down on its own, inches from salvation. He died on Earth, there on that ramp that had taken him to far way places and introduced him to a universe beyond his imagination. It should have been an ending, as it had been for the others, but death was a thing he’d come to believe never really ended anything. It wasn’t so new, but he still believed.

The fifth time was perhaps the hardest. Not in the actions that led to it, for he believed he did the only right thing. The other times had been relatively quick, he’d gone and come back so fast it scarcely compared. There were the sensations of pain, of sadness, remorse for not finishing what he had set out to do…but this time there was only the long lingering…the waiting, and watching them wait. He remembers the anguish in their eyes, the nearly physical pain as they sat with him, never realizing that their sadness hurt him more than the physical pain of his body disintegrating. Nor would he have told them. In the end, he had wanted the release; he’d let go and asked them to do the same. Nothing was new, and his belief had faltered.

Perhaps the sixth time wasn’t really about dying, but he considers it all the same, the ending of one existence, even as he was reborn into another. He doesn’t remember much about it at all. There was falling. There was pain, confusion. There was the overwhelming sense that he had lost something of grave importance. He was one thing and then he was not, and he was once again the man who died, only to live again.

The seventh time he felt it coming. He knew, almost before his captor did. It didn’t matter if it looked like _her_ , he had found a way inside and he knew. It stabbed through him, cutting him, bleeding him out into the cold expanse of space as everything disintegrated around him. It was quick and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. He remembers the satisfaction, the pride in knowing his friends had beaten an enemy that had dared believe itself unstoppable. He remembers the dark of space as it swallowed him and the surrender of self in the space of the undeniable. He remembers welcoming death like an old friend.

The eighth time, like the sixth wasn’t really dying, though if he counts the one, he must count the other, even if he shed one skin for no skin only to return to the previous skin again. It was still an ending, a closing of a door that would likely never open to him again. He had found his purpose, rediscovered belief. Of all of his deaths, he is most satisfied with this.

He ponders this, even as he accepts their touch, their affection. He is changed…each death purged a piece of himself he’d outgrown…each new life brought him closer to this person he had become. Perhaps he has used up all of his opportunities to evade death. Perhaps, in retrospect, death simply has never been ready for him and he’ll have to live with that.


End file.
